Read The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle in Englishwith every sentence explained

The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting was first published in 1922. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 72,200 words.

A cobbler's son. A doctor who talks to animals. A ship bound for the unknown.

Tommy Stubbins is nine and a half, the son of a poor shoemaker in Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, and he longs to see the world. One rainy day he meets John Dolittle, the strange little doctor who understands the language of animals, and soon Tommy is his assistant, learning to speak with birds and beasts from the wise old parrot Polynesia.

When news arrives that Long Arrow, the greatest naturalist who ever lived, has vanished somewhere near Spidermonkey Island, the Doctor decides to go and find him. With Tommy, Polynesia, Jip the dog and Chee-Chee the monkey, he sets sail on a small ship called the Curlew, straight into storms, adventures and mysteries.

Winner of the Newbery Medal, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle is the much-loved sequel to The Story of Doctor Dolittle.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of English and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.